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How Islamic State militants hijacked history

“Since their main battles now are against fellow Muslims, they model themselves on the period after the death of Prophet Muhammad when many Muslims left Islam.”

When the caliph Umar and his conquering army swept through northern Syria, he struck a pact with the defeated Christians in the town of Raqqa. The Christians would pay a special tax and in return would not be harmed and be allowed to practice their faith, albeit as second-class citizens.

That was around 637 AD. When the Islamic State, the terror group previously known as ISIL, captured Raqqa 1,376 years later and set up a de facto capital in the city, it imposed a similar version of Umar’s pact on the ancient Christian community.

It is one of the ways in which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the designer-watch-wearing leader of the Islamic State, is trying to recreate the 7th century in the huge swathes of territory his militants control in northern Syria and western Iraq. They describe it as a caliphate, a unified Muslim state, with al-Baghdadi as its ruler, or caliph.

The early years of Islamic history “offers massive ideological fodder” to the Islamic State militants, says Hassan Hassan, a Syrian-born analyst at the Delma Institute, a research centre in Abu Dhabi.

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But even by the standards of 7th-century Arabia, the Islamic State is falling short because it is cherry picking and distorting historical events to justify a gruesome campaign of beheadings, crucifixions and massacres in a bid to gain power.

To describe the Islamic State as medieval would probably be an insult to the caliphs of the Middle Ages who oversaw an astonishing period of science and advancement while Europe languished in the dark.

In Baghdad, the caliph Abu Jafar al-Mamum was patron of the House of Wisdom, a vast public library set up around 830 AD, where Muslim and Christian scholars translated Greek and Indian texts into Arabic, while the mathematician Muhammad al-Khwarizmi discovered zero and Avicenna argued that light was composed of particles.

“A thousand years ago the roles were reversed,” with Europe falling behind and Middle East civilization flourishing, wrote British physicist Jim al-Khalili in his book House of Wisdom.

Islamic State militants are ignoring the height of Islamic civilization and focusing on the 29-year period after the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632.

That was the period when the four “rightly guided caliphs” — Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali — who were close to Muhammad, took the young religion out of the Arabian desert and transformed it into a major world power.

It has become an idealized time and Abu Bakr and Umar in particular were popular, says professor Robert Hoyland at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.

“You get a clear image that comes across in the historic portrayals of Abu Bakr as a prudent, cautious type,” he says. “He and Umar were both 100-per-cent pious and close to Muhammad. Umar is seen as quick-tempered and rushing to judgment, but is seen as being totally honest and making decisions about how to found a state.”

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After Islamic State militants took Raqqa, they crossed the border into Iraq earlier this year to capture Mosul, Fallujah and Tikrit. They murdered rival Syrian rebels and Kurds, and have within their sights the Shiite government in Baghdad.

“Since their main battles now are against fellow Muslims, they model themselves on the period after the death of Prophet Muhammad when many Muslims left Islam or refused to pay zakat (charity tax), and thus the first caliph Abu Bakr declared them apostates and fought them,” says Hassan.

Abu Bakr’s apostasy wars had a specific context. The religious scholar Karen Armstrong writes in her book Islam that some of the newly converted tribes in present-day Saudi Arabia were breaking away partly because they believed their pact was with Muhammad, not his successor Abu Bakr, which would free them to fight and raid other tribes. That prospect risked overturning the Prophet’s achievement of bringing peace to a region previously torn apart by tribal warfare, so Abu Bakr quelled the rebellions.

“Crucifixion is for rebels of the state so it only occurs much later, not in the early conquest period,” said Hoyland. “And beheadings, well, you get soldiers who get carried away and war is nasty, but there are no accounts that there was a systematic barbarity.”

Forced conversion is another issue. The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that at the beginning of August, 2,500 Yazidis, a minority non-Muslim group, were captured in Iraq. Those who agreed to convert to Sunni Islam were being held by IS fighters, while the men who refused were murdered and their wives and children taken away as slaves.

But the early caliphs did not encourage conversion, says Hoyland.

“It was seen as a strange idea,” he says. The Muslim armies were funded by taxes collected from conquered populations — and soldiers were easy to recruit because they were paid salaries.

“You don’t want to let your tax base disappear so there was no attempt to convert people,” he says.

Armstrong also points out that in the 7th century Muslim leaders assumed Islam was a religion for the descendants of Ishmael, just as Judaism was for the sons of Isaac, so they did not expect conversions from the people they came across as they expanded territory.

But al-Baghdadi, as he calls himself, may have trouble persuading the unruly denizens of social media of his worthiness as a successor to the likes of Umar. In one popular satirical advertisement making the rounds on Twitter he is shown as an Omega watch model with the tag line “Baghdadi’s Choice.”

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